Langton's Ant

Squares on a grid are colored either black or white. The square at the center of the grid (which is chosen arbitrarily) is the ant. The ant travels along the grid according to 2 extremely simple rules:

• When on a white square, it turns 90° clockwise, turns the square into a black square, then moves forward by one square.

• When on a black square, it turns 90° counter-clockwise, turns the square into a white square, then also moves forward by one square.

These very simple rules lead to complex behaviours. The ant will begin with symmetric patterns, then will enter a chaotic behavior. But the most interesting behaviour is that the ant will always end up building what is called a highway, a recurrent pattern, whatever the initial conditions are.

This small experiment inspired by Chris Langton creation is just an Unity project I made to chill out and have fun with some post processing effects and a simple but fascinating algorithm. This version does not show a lot about the ant complexity but some random values can still lead to interesting results!